The recent few years has witnessed an explosive growth of data traffic in networks, particularly in cellular wireless networks. This growth has been fueled by a number of new developments including faster, smarter, and more intuitive mobile devices such as the popular iPhone® series and the iPad® series, as well as faster wireless and cellular network technologies that deliver throughputs on par or better than fixed line broadband technologies.
For many people today, a primary mode of access to the Internet is via mobile devices using cellular wireless networks. Websites such as Google™ or YouTube™ provide an increasing amount of multimedia content to mobile devices. For example, Google™ or YouTube™ provide videos using HTTP live streaming (HLS) protocols. An HLS protocol is an adaptive bit-rate (ABR) type protocol and is one of the protocols for providing multimedia content to mobile devices. In the past, some of the multimedia content provided using the HLS protocols are encrypted. In recent years, however, websites such as Google™ or YouTube™ are increasingly encrypting multimedia content provided using the HLS protocols. For example, videos are increasingly transported using secure sockets layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) protocols. Another adaptive bit-rate type protocol for providing multimedia content to mobile devices is the dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) protocol. Websites can also provide encrypted multimedia content to mobile devices using the DASH protocols.
When encrypted multimedia content are provided to mobile devices using, for example, SSL or TLS protocols, measurement of quality of experience (QoE) parameters can be affected. Quality of experience parameters include, for example, user experience indexing (UXI) parameters that reflect the subscribers' quality of experience of using the mobile devices. The UXI parameters include metrics such as the total media time of the multimedia content provided, the video bitrate, and the amount of video stalling. Measurement of such UXI parameters can be used for implementing traffic management techniques or for reporting purposes. Traffic management is a broad concept and includes techniques such as throttling of low priority traffic, blocking or time shifting certain types of traffic, and traffic optimization. Optimization of web and video traffic is a key component in the array of traffic management techniques used by wireless operators. Therefore, when the measurement of the QoE parameters are affected by the encryption of the multimedia content transmitted to mobile devices, the implementation of traffic management techniques can be negatively affected as well.